Very nice forums Jill. But I have one teensie problem. You left cre8. Now a whole bunch of people are going to check your forums out, and post here. It's going to get busy, lot's of good information, etc. etc. And just how am I going to get any work done having to read this good forum and that good forum ....

I love the idea of more forums, more info, more places to get different perspectives on things.

I do have one suggestion, while you're in the process of tweaking this thing. When I get an email saying that a thread to which I've subscribed has received a new post, I follow the link and it takes me to the beginning of the thread instead of the newest post. I have to click again on the "first unread post" link or scroll down the page. Usability, usability, usability

Dainty wasn't what they were after. It was speed, and thoroughness.
When those natives were done, both the drumsticks and the flappers were nearly bare bone. It was like... piranhas. Amazing.

I miss buffalo wild wings. They're not exactly authoritative wings, but they're better than many. Where you at, SEO Guy? You know BWW used to be called BW3, for Buffalo Wild Wings & Weck? Well, turns out nobody but Buffalonians actually eat weck, so they don't carry it anymore. but, we in Rochester still called them BW3.

I'm psyched about these forums. i'm a recently formed addict for them. I did just do a search for "dragonlady7" on google-- it had never occurred to me before, oddly-- and found a post of mine on a forum I joined years ago and forgot about totally.
I'm going to have to play with these forums less at work, though. I'm getting more and more busy there. Phooey. I also have a feeling that they're a slippery slope-- you keep finding more and more of them and wanting to spend more and more time. Danger! But, I learn so much at these places that I don't want to cut back... So, i'll have to work on my copywriting and quit my day job so i can be on here whenever I want. Right? Yes. Good plan.

Forgive the ignorance, but I've never been to Buffalo or Rochester (though I passed Buffalo taking the long route to Iowa City once and I have a cousin I've never met who's a chemist at Kodak), so I have to ask: What's a weck?

I don't know what weck is, but when I lived in Cincinnati, they kept trying to get me to eat goetta. Still don't know what it is, exactly. Something like oatmeal and sausage mixed together and fried. It's a meat... it's a grain... it's kind of brownish-grey...

I don't remember goetta, Scottie. Your description makes it sound a little like scrapple, though. (If you don't know what scrapple is, you might not want to ask... though I confess that I like it.)

I lived in Cincinnati from the ages of 7 to 13. I do remember that you couldn't get hot dogs at a Cincinnati Reds game. There were those metts, and there were a darker sausage called brats. Tasted OK to me...

"weck" is "Kimmelweck", a kind of sandwich roll. The top is encrusted with salt and caraway seeds. It's most often served around a roast beef sandwich-- "beef on weck"-- with warm thin-sliced roast beef, often au jus, and to top it off you put hot hot hot horseradish in there that'll knock your socks right off. Man, that's the best. I keep having a craving for one of those and there's no way to get it here.
No, no scrapple, no strange "meat-like" substances...
They call hotdogs "hots" (though that's more of a Rochester thing) and serve them with immense varieties of toppings-- "meat sauce", hot mustard, raw onions, etc. In Rochester they have "red hots" and "white hots", and for some reason they refer to them as "texas hots" even though the Lone Star State has nothing whatsoever to do with it. They're pretty good and don't involve any weirder bits of meat than your usual hot dogs.

Ahh, regional cuisine... Buffalo is my adopted third home and it's my firm belief that the best food in the world is there. But think it over-- given their weather, what else are they going to do? When I was going there to meet my boyfriend's parents for the first time, he spent days making up lists of all the restaurants we were going to see. More than a year later, we still haven't gotten around to all of them yet.

Regional foods from here include more than scrapple. Maryland Blue crabs, lots of dishes with chicken, and mushrooms, mushrooms, and more mushrooms (you can smell the odor of a mushroom farm from a good distance away.)

I grew up just eating my mom's cooking, which was for the most part basic, nutritious, and pleasant. She's recently begun branching out into Carribbean and Mexican cooking, which makes me sorry to miss it... I'd never heard anyone be as passionate about food as my boyfriend is. You wouldn't ever guess to look at him (as a hint, his jeans size is 29x36-- 29" waist, 36" inseam. He looks like he lives off an IV or something.) but the single largest love of his life is food. I think the reason he likes me so much is that I make him lunch every morning. (He forgot it today. It was really good, too.) His family will sit around and talk about food at any time, including when they're out getting food. But that's because there's so much good food in Buffalo. I've never been so impressed by the culinary merits of a city before. It's not just the wings and weck, either. They do fish fries for Lent that you wouldn't believe-- you look *forward* to Ash Wednesday because the restaurants will start getting the haddock out and it's to *die* for. Good Friday is a sad day because you know it's the last fish fry until next year. (Jesus who? Oh, him, right--see you at the vigil Mass tomorrow. Don't talk to me now, I got some serious eating to do.) They do amazing Polish foods I can't pronounce, they do Italian delicacies that will knock your socks off, they fry potatoes like you wouldn't believe, and there are half a dozen fabulous ice cream parlors that are guaranteed to try their best to spoil your appetite for the rest of the week (but won't succeed. I fast for a week before I go to Buffalo just so I can fit it all in). Every time we come back from Buffalo we have to haul a carload of food 400 miles and then up three flights of stairs. Oof.

I just always remember the night we went out to this gorgeous little Carribbean restaurant in Lackawanna (Krista's, if you're ever in town-- fabulous) for his mom's birthday, and we're sitting there enjoying the best jerk chicken you ever had, and his family is all talking about their favorite place to get Mexican food! They couldn't even stop talking about food while they were eating it!

One of these days I'm going to write a book about Buffalo, and it's going to be interspersed with recipes, Like Water For Chocolate-style.